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See this is the thing that gets me about all this 90s nostalgia bullshit that's ongoing. The 90s fucking sucked and skateboarders were in general homophobic pieces of shit who for the most part acted like low-brow jocks with a Napoleon complex. At least where I was from, you were a fucking kook for thinking homosexuality was okay. I remain to this day one happy kook cause I'll never get the hate and think on a personal level that if you don't like homosexuality it probably means that you're in the closet. Or it just means you are a piece of shit.
what an idiotic, over-generalization. For most skateboarders in the 90s there was a sad division between social belonging or being true to yourself, and that meant being ostracized and picked on at worst, or being ignored at best. Skateboarding's never been perfect, but its sympathies in the 90's were distinctly aligned with the outsider, the weirdo, and the fag- If you never got called a skater-fag in the nineties, you were probably never there. In the nineties I said the word "gay" a lot, everything was gaygaygay, and I still hung out with lots of gay people and went out to gay bars too because they had better music and less people who wanted to beat me up, and girls there tended to be more open minded.
What did you do in the nineties? were you telling skaters they were homophobic pieces of shit like you are now, or did you keep most your thoughts up in your head like we all do?
I was calling people out on their homophobia then, just like I do now. I've been knocked out over it a few times too. Cause I'm stupid, and put myself into stupid situations because I'm not afraid and I fight for what I believe in.
So you can call me an idiot, I really don't care. I'm not the one who was admittedly dove tailing queer culture in the 90s while simultaneously verbally abusing that same culture by using an idiotic, over-generalization.
I don't think you're an idiot, I think you're angry and equating that with being right and/or progressive, which maybe you are, but where I take issue with you, is your description in such violent terms of skateboarding as a scene.
Society is homophobic then as now, don't think it's not just because you can watch project runway. But in the 90s when gay culture was more clearly separate from mainstream culture, there was a certain amount of natural overlap with skateboarding, mostly through club culture, just like there was with punk, or hip-hop. Of course there are exceptions to every rule and I'm not trying to suggest that skateboarding was actively pro-gay (skateboarding isn't very sexual in general imo), I'm just saying that given the social landscape in the 90s, the level of integration between homosexuality and skateboarding was no worse than most and in some ways it was better.
Take the long-running Big Brother rumour that Ed Templeton was gay: yes, it held a degree of homophobia, but at the same time it was progressive. There's no way sports illustrated would have openly suggested that a famous football player was gay, because it was such a terrible secret to be gay right? But in Ed's case he didn't even deny it, he even sort of encouraged it, and it helped normalize homosexuality in skateboarding to have it discussed out in the open, even as a sort-of joke, at least it did for me.
Today people criticize 917 for some of the fire island references or "dovetailing" gay culture as you put it, but take a look at the bigger picture: here's one of the more popular skateboard brands proclaiming that gay culture is cool by association. In mainstream culture today, you have very few individuals or companies explicitly making that association, most brands (including non-skate brands) are still marketed in very segregated ways. Even something as crude as the butthole AH board (a reference to Andy Roy's jail sex I believe) is still a coded allusion to Andy engaging in gay sex. Find me another example of someone marketing sports equipment to a non-specifically gay market, using an athlete's homosexuality as a selling point.
Again, my point is not that skateboarding is perfect, far far from it: but considered relative to wider popular culture, I think it has historically fostered a certain awareness of difference that over time becomes acceptance and even appreciation.